A month in St. Lucia during the final countdown to our circumnavigation — January 11, 2023 through February 18, 2023 (subtitle: We are really doing this!)

Yawn alert! We have been told (mostly by are loving children) that our blog is, well, tedious and boring (to be quite blunt), containing way too much detail. They don’t read it. (Though they do like our Instagram posts!). We think they are probably right but, as we have said, we are really writing this blog for ourselves, recording our adventures to preserve the memory of our joys, our challenges and triumphs and, yes, even the tedium that is part of living on a boat full time and sailing around the world at about 10 miles per hour. This entry probably gets top honors in the dull category. No visits to exotic islands or epic sails. Just a recount — in glorious detail — of our last month in St. Lucia as we got in one last visit with our son and his family and prepared for the 7 month voyage to Australia! Read and your own risk and don’t say we didn’t warn you. . . .

Greetings from St. Lucia on the day before we launch on our circumnavigation. As we mentioned in our last blog entry, we arrived in St. Lucia on January 11 after an amazing beam reach sail. We took that as a good omen for our St. Lucia visit and, as it turned out, it was. We had a jammed packed, but marvelous, month in St. Lucia as we entered the one month countdown to our long awaited circumnavigation. We can hardly believe that after a 2 year delay, tomorrow is the day the adventure begins. We are euphoric and excited about the journey ahead but with a touch of anxiousness about the unknown and melancholy about the special people in our lives (particularly our children and two granddaughters) with whom we will be in less frequent contact and, sigh, we won’t be able to hug for a very long time.

Our visit to St. Lucia got off to a great start with the long-awaited visit from our son, Tristan, his wife, Maria, and their two darling girls, ages 16 months and 5 years. (5 1/2! the 5 year old would chime in with more than a hint of indignation.) For their visit we got a slip at Marigot Bay Resort and Marina because we had stayed there in the Spring on 2 separate occasions, enjoying the resort’s beautiful pools, including a very shallow floating pool that doubled (in our opinion) as the world’s largest kiddie pool, and lovely restaurants. At the time, like most of the resorts we have visited on the windward Islands, there was no resort fee. That meant that as long as you picked up a mooring or reserved dock space you had full use of the facilities at no cost. Of course, if you chose to eat at any of the several resort restaurants while there you paid menu prices. Unfortunately, that changed in November when the new owners of the resort implemented a “resort fee”. For the “small” fee of $110 USD per person ($55 USD for children 3 years old and up) — detect a note of sarcasm? — you could buy a day pass that would allow you to enjoy the resort facilities including the pool, restaurants and bars, from 9:00 AM until 5:00 PM on an all inclusive basis.

Of course, no one notified us of this change. We read about it in a very unhappy post on the St. Lucia Cruisers FaceBook page and by the time we learned about it we were at the point of no return. While Grenada would have been a great option — we had a marvelous experience at True Blue Resort there during a visit with our younger two kids and their partners over the Thanksgiving holiday — it was too late for Tristan and Maria to try to change their plane tickets. Moreover, Maria’s parents, Donna and Gordon, reserved a room at the resort during the week of their visit so we could enjoy our children and grandchildren together. They, too, would incur plane ticket change fees and would lose the deposit they paid for their room. So, in short, we were committed. In fairness (though it pains us to acknowledge this), the resort fee did include all the food you could eat and all the alcohol you could consume during day pass hours. Still, at $495 per day for all of us, it was not exactly budget friendly for the all expense paid (by us) vacation we had promised Tristan and Maria. With no alternative, we were determined to make the best of the situation and we ended up buying these resort passes on three separate days, making sure we got our money’s worth. (We do have a funny story about the day pass purchasing process — see below.) We filled the other days with a trip to the small beach (accessible by the cutest little ferry ever) across the narrow harbor from the resort as well as two separate water taxi excursions to gorgeous beaches (Sugar Sand Beach and Anse Chastanet beach) that were further away from the resort and better suited for snorkeling, swimming and building sand castles. Of course, from the perspective of our granddaughters’, the best part of the vacation were the puddles that formed in the large courtyard near our slip after a rain shower. They happily jumped in the puddles, splashing themselves and anyone passing by, for hours! It was reminiscent of our outings to the St. Louis Botanical Gardens during rain showers when our kids were little so they could gleefully jump from puddle to puddle in their yellow LLB rain slickers and boots. The simple joys are timeless and transcend the generations!

Funny (at least to us) story: The resort clearly hadn’t worked out the kinks with the day pass option. On the first day that we purchased the day pass the process was simple and smooth. Jill was instructed by the marina staff to proceed to the front desk, purchase the passes, get the wrist bands and then deliver them back to the marina where the marina staff would supervise the placement on our wrists. Easy peasy! Expecting that same process the second day, Jill arrived at the front desk at 9 AM to purchase the day passes. She was told that she couldn’t do that. All the individuals for whom a pass was being purchased had to be present, with their passports, in the reception area so that the reception staff could personally place the bands on their wrists. Jill tried to politely explain that this was different than the very customer friendly process she had followed the day before and that we had 4 adults and two small children all purchasing day passes. Surely, they didn’t really want our entire group to present at the front desk? The answer to that question would be a resounding YES so Jill went back to Che Figata to round up the troops for the pilgrimage to the front desk. When she arrived on the boat the 5 year old was in the middle of an epic melt down — it’s a rare occurrence at this point but it was just one of those days — so no one was thrilled with the idea of traipsing to the front desk. Unfortunately, we had no choice and it was clear that the melt down was not going to end anytime soon so Tristan swooped the 5 year old up in his arms and led the procession to the reception area. The 5 year old continued to wail during the entire process — much to the chagrin of the staff — while we took perverse joy in the scene we were making. We have a hunch it won’t take the resort management long to rethink that policy.

In the end, Tristan, Maria and their girls had a great time. It’s always wonderful to spend time together — we all really like each other! — and they enjoyed the change in scenery and weather. Sunny 80 degree days, with the intermittent rain showers accompanied by magnificent rainbows, on a tropical island beats Chicago in January anytime. And, in a blink of any eye, it was over. Jill worked hard not to cry as Tristan and Maria loaded themselves and their girls into taxi that would whisk them away to the airport. Jill may have had sun in her eyes or she might have been wiping away a tear or two as we cast off for Rodney Bay Marina — the starting point for the rally — soon after the Chicago Hummels departed.

Though Tristan and Maria had to go back to work, Donna and Gordon stayed on island an extra 6 days to explore St. Lucia. Their first week was all about spending time with the kids and grandkids so they didn’t have the opportunity to really get to know this beautiful island. We were fortunate that they included a visit to Rodney Bay in their itinerary so we could spent some time with them. With all the focus on our shared grandchildren we hardly had time to talk! We had a lovely time showing them around the marina and hearing about their great adventures sans the Hummel gang. With great vivacity, they told us of their “small world” experience while spending time in Soufriere. While there they ran into another relatively recently retired couple from Connecticut (our last state of residence — more akin to a big small town given the size of the state and its population — before retirement) who were living on their sailboat. Interestingly, the husband grew up in the Strathmore Village neighborhood in Manhasset which is where we lived immediately before we moved to Connecticut. This couple was anchored off Soufriere but were headed to Rodney Bay in a few days. We were excited to meet this couple but, unfortunately, in the course of their lengthy conversation with them Donna and Gordon didn’t get their names or the name of their sailboat. Without continuously walking up and down the docks at Rodney Bay Marina — there are 8 long ones — it would be difficult to find them without some identifying information.

Coincidentally, when they arrived, the marina assigned them to slip F17, just 4 slips away from Che Figata. Even more fortuitously, they had to walk down the dock past our boat to to get to land. They immediately saw the hailing port on our back transom — Blackrock, CT — and introduced themselves. It didn’t take us long to figure out that they — Roger and Kay (they now had names!) — were the couple Donna and Gordon had met just a few days earlier. We ended up having dinner with them two evenings and treated each other to tours on our respective sailboats. Theirs, a Ted Hood design, was incredibly beautiful and roomy. With an extra foot in length as well as width (vs. Che Figata’s measurements), and a really high freeboard, their boat (SV Further) was very home-like. In addition, the interior was filled with impeccably crafted custom cherry cabinetry that was as functional and it was beautiful. It even covered the facade of their refrigerator that was a large as the ones you might find in an apartment. And no bending down! The refrigerator was built into a wall, rather than underneath a counter, so you could store or retrieve food without kneeling (or sometimes laying on the floorboards as you search for something way in the back!). While we love Che Figata, Jill definitely had refrigerator envy.

In addition to lots of socializing, Roger graciously helped Zack learn the basics of our SSB radio. Because SSB radios are capable of supporting communications between people over long distances (a properly installed SSB has a range in excess of 4000 miles), our rally uses the SSB radio for a daily “net.” This is similar to the cruisers nets we have described in earlier blog entries. It allows the rally participants to tune into a designated frequency at a time certain to hear how everyone is doing, get updates and, importantly, communicate any needs or ask questions. For this reason it was pretty critical that we figure out how to use it. Unfortunately, the SSB is not as simple as a VHF radio that you simply turn on and flip to the desired channel so there’s a learning curve. Though Zack has a way to go until the information is just part of his muscle memory, after spending time with Roger he was able to successfully tune into the “Coconut Telegraph” — a cruiser net that covers the entire Eastern Caribbean (rather than just one island or harbor) — and (yay!) both transmit and receive. It was a great relief to validate that our SSB is working properly and that it is just a matter of continuing to learn the system. (If our SSB wasn’t working we would have much bigger problems given that were were about 2 weeks from our launch date at that point.) We are so grateful that Roger took the time to help Zack wade through various SSB materials and capture the basics. We have found in our sailing lives that sometimes you meet people with whom you just click and, in a short period of time, they feel like old friends. We place Kay and Roger in that category and look forward to following their adventures on SV Further.

We said goodbye to Kay and Roger in the morning on February 2 and in the afternoon we said hello to our good friends on Blue Pearl, Laurie and Rudd, as well as their crew member Mark. It was time for the long awaited crew exchange! We had a whirlwind visit with Laurie and Ruud because they were on their way to meet an old family friend who was flying into Antigua. So, after 2 days together, the transfer of Mark and his belongings, and a tearful good-bye (but with tentative plans to reconnect in person when we visit the states in the fall and perhaps when we visit New Zealand next winter), they were off. Laurie and Ruud are another amazing couple who we feel like we’ve known for ages and, perhaps unfortunately for them, have become friends for life. As we mentioned in prior posts, Laurie and Ruud participated in the World ARC rally in 2018/2019. In addition to sharing lots of good laughs as we spent time together in Antigua and Grenada in 2022, they have helped us tremendously as we prepared for our adventure. Though all of their contributions are too numerous to list, we are are grateful for all of the knowledge they shared, the charts and books they have given us and their recruitment of our crew member. (Jill thinks Zack may secretly be most grateful to Laurie for suggesting to Jill that she buy a mini bread machine to bake bread during long passages. He has been savoring the smells and tastes of the freshly bake bread that Jill now serves up 2 or 3 times a week.)

While all of these comings and goings occurred we continued to prep for our rally. We had a lot to do and no blog entry would be complete without its share of tedium so we will list a sampling of the many things we needed to do before taking off. These include completing our “homework” assignments following our virtual safety inspection (fortunately, it was a relatively short list), ticking off items on our repair list (e.g., replacing a malfunctioning float switch), filling our propane tanks, purchasing oil for oil changes, installing the antenna for our new Iridium Go unit (our back up communications system), activating the system and figuring out how to use it (this last piece took the better part of a full day — let’s just say it involves three separate apps!), learning how to transmit and receive on our SSB radio (as mentioned above), getting a power cord and connector fabricated for Euro power, reorganizing all of our storage areas to purge items we don’t need and make room for all of the spares we purchased for our engine, generator and watermaker, picking up and storing said spares, creating an inventory of the spares noting the location so we can find them when we need them, fixing the sunshade in our forward cabin (the original one was covered with very stubborn mildew after getting wet from the condensation caused by the AC unit installed in Trinidad to protect against mold while the boat was on the hard), conducting an inventory all of our stored non-perishables (this, by the way, was a Herculean task involving checking expiration dates of canned goods, updating our Excel inventory file which includes the quantity and specific location of all our stored food, reorganizing our provisions for more easy retrieval in the future, making room for additional rations and noting which items need to go on our shopping list to have a sufficient level of reserves as we sail to Australia), buying the remaining toiletries we didn’t acquire while we were in the states, provisioning and cooking dinners for our first passage to Columbia (Jill spent 2 days cooking 6 dinners — which she froze — and planned two additional meals that would be easy to prepare during a passage), reviewing safety and man overboard procedures (so we can successfully retrieve anyone who ends up in the water in the very unlikely event that happens), assigning crew jobs (who monitors what systems), reviewing the content of our grab bag to make sure it had the right food, water and equipment to supplement what’s in our life raft (just in case!), setting up the jacklines (which are lines that run the length of our boat and we can clip into if we need to leave the cockpit while underway — designed to prevent man overboard!), retaining technicians for preventative maintenance to get all of our systems in top notch condition before we set sail. Enough detail for you? Kind of makes your head spin doesn’t it. The good news is that we had 4 weeks to do all of this stuff and, true to form, Jill maintained a check list that kept us on track, allowing us to whittle away at the tasks in small bites. Zack is learning to appreciate Jill’s OCD tendencies!

Not on the above list, but something that literally took hours, was fixing our website. For reasons that remain a complete mystery, at some point the image on our home page switched from a picture of our beloved Che Figata to a picture of the Statue of Liberty. While there is something somewhat fitting about that image as Jill, a scrappy kid from Queens, was born and raised in New York City, it was not the image we wanted for our sailing blog. Jill is the administrator of our website and though she has learned a lot over the last few years, she is by no means an expert. So when she was unable to restore the original image despite hours of effort — she couldn’t even find the picture of the Statue of Liberty anywhere on the admin site — she reached out to BlueHost (the host of our WorldPress blog) to seek their support. She chatted with their agents on 3 separate occasions — once until 1 AM — so they could troubleshoot the problem. Unfortunately, despite being empathetic, professional and courteous, they didn’t seem willing or able to identify the root cause of the issue. Instead they suggested that Jill allow them to use backup to restore the cite to earlier versions. Desperate — Jill considered this development nothing short of a crisis — she agreed. However, two separate attempts which restored the cite to a date prior to when the change occurred (wiping out a recent blog post in the process), did not solve the underlying problem. At this point, Jill reached out to Tristan and Maria (graduates of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago) to see if there was a web design expert among their artsy friends. Jill, definitely the more budget conscious member of our crew, was willing to pay almost anything to have our home page display a picture of Che Figata. Though Tristan and Maria had no one to suggest, Tristan, who is somewhat familiar with World Press, provided Jill with a few suggestions that gave her the confidence to go back into the admin site and play around further. After additional navigating she was able to get to a section where she could edit the home page and found a “customize” icon. When she clicked that icon it showed the home page with the Statue of Liberty image and, after clicking the image, she was able to see where the picture of the Statue of Liberty was posted and remove it. That immediately restored the original image of lovely Che Figata. While Jill still has no idea how the Statue of Liberty image got there in the first place — perhaps during one of the routine updates that WorldPress conducts? — she was beyond ecstatic that the home page was back the way it was intended to be. And she has acquired a very useful skill should the WorldPress gremlins decide to change our home page again!

While working our task list and fixing our website we also began meeting other participants in our rally as they started to arrive at RodneyBay Marina in advance of the official kick-off of pre-rally events on February 13. It was great fun getting to know this group of people we will be sailing half way across the world with! And, as an added bonus, we acquired some things on our “want” list. Like us, our fellow rally participants where going through their storage areas to purge items they didn’t need and make room for the items they did need. As a results of this purge, we acquired a passerelle, a motor handle extension for our dinghy outboard (ours seemed to have “walked off” sometimes during our Grenadine tour) and some wall mount storage brackets.

While we kept very busy since our arrival in Rodney Bay, things really hit home on February 13, the date of the official World ARC Pacific kickoff. That was the date by which all rally participants were expected to arrive in Rodney Bay. With the official start underway we registered our arrival with the World Cruising Club team and attended the various social events and rally briefings (e.g., route overview, safety review, weather, etc.) that occurred throughout the week leading up to the February 18 launch date.

During this process we were assigned our rally number. These numbers are much like the numbers that are assigned to runners for races except, of course, that we needed to tie the banner with the number to our boat. We were assigned #29. We decided that this was quite auspicious. According to numerology, the number 29 signifies change, ambition, and progress. If this number pops up it means that big changes — like something new beginning in your life (perhaps a circumnavigation???) — are on the horizon and you are advised to be prepared for new adventures! We may not be true numerology adherents but it still felt like kismet! (Our feature image for this post is the crew of SV Che Figata standing behind our number on the stern of our boat.)

And here we finally are on the verge of casting off! Our first passage takes us from St. Lucia to Santa Marta, Columbia, a distance of just over 800 nautical miles. Depending on wind and current, we can make up to 200 NM per day but, not counting on the best case scenario every day, we are estimating that this first passage will take us about 5 days. Once we arrive, we will enjoy the area for 4 – 5 days before taking off for the San Blas Islands, Panama on March 1. That will be a short 280 NM jaunt (1-2 days) and, once there, we have about a week to explore the islands before taking off for Colon, Panama where we will start our journey through the Panama Canal. We are not sure when we will post out next blog, probably just as we arrive in Colon on or about March 10 but don’t hold us to it! As a reminder, for those following along at home, you can stalk us at https://my.yb.tl/CheFigata (this tracker transmits our location every 4 hours and is really pretty cool) and see our photos at https://www.instagram.com/sailingchefigata. Wish us well!